On Blu-ray/DVD: DESTROYER (2018) and WE DIE YOUNG (2019)

DESTROYER
(US/UK - 2018)

Last fall, DESTROYER had some awards-season buzz going for Nicole Kidman, but financially-strapped distributor Annapurna decided to focus their attention on the Oscar-baiting VICE instead, leaving DESTROYER to flounder on just 235 screens at its widest release. Looking what can be charitably described as several degrees south of haggard, Kidman did get a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as hard-drinking LAPD detective Erin Bell, a disgraced ex-FBI agent who's pretty much regarded as a total shitshow among her colleagues and always looks like she hasn't slept in days. Though two other cops have already caught the case, she shows up at a homicide where the John Doe murder victim was shot dead and has dye-stained $100 bills scattered around his body. Back at the precinct, someone mails her an envelope with an identically dye-stained $100 bill. She's convinced it's a message and she knows who's sending it: Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of a ring of bank robbers she and her former FBI partner Chris (Sebastian Stan) infiltrated as part of an extensive undercover operation nearly 17 years ago. Going rogue and blowing off her partner Antonio (Shamier Anderson), Erin starts tracking down all of Silas' known associates, none of whom are happy to see her since her cover was ultimately blown. She eventually works her way to Silas' sleazy, money-laundering lawyer DiFranco (Bradley Whitford), who's been holding the take and doling it out as requested in clandestine park handoffs to Silas' drug-addled girlfriend Petra (Tatiana Maslany). As Erin predicted, Silas' money is running out and he's resurfaced to plan another robbery and settle old scores.

At its core, DESTROYER is another saga of a morally-conflicted cop, with Kidman fearlessly diving  into her own TRAINING DAY crossed with a bit of BAD LIEUTENANT, with one shock value scene where she goes to absurd lengths to get info on Silas' whereabouts from one of his terminally-ill former accomplices. But director Karyn Kusama and writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (the trio also worked on 2005's AEON FLUX and 2016's terrifying THE INVITATION), have a few unexpected tricks up their sleeves beyond a cleverly-constructed ending and one incredibly intense robbery sequence. These are doled out slowly in a series of flashbacks to the undercover operation that play as a parallel timeline to the current events. Erin's job, boozing, and pill-popping are at the expense of fractured relationships with her ex Ethan (Scoot McNairy) and her teenage daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), and as the backstory gradually fills in, you finally get a sense of the extent to which she's gone to numb the pain. Everyone in her life has written her off, with the possible exception of her sympathetic former FBI boss Gil (Toby Huss), who invites her to a Bible study, insisting "It's low-key...nobody's handling snakes," prompting one of the very few times present-day Erin cracks a sort-of smile. In the end, DESTROYER doesn't absolve Erin of her sins and doesn't ask the audience for sympathy, but Kidman succeeds in conveying the humanity underneath an irreparably damaged person who can't stop making terrible decisions. (R, 121 mins)

WE DIE YOUNG
(US/Bulgaria/UK - 2019)

Following the French drama THE BOUNCER, Jean-Claude Van Damme gets another chance to go serious with the earnest but cliched WE DIE YOUNG. Hampered by obvious budget constraints, the film gets off to a clunky start with too many shots of a Bulgarian backlot unsuccessfully portraying the mean streets of Washington, D.C. (no streets have as many mailboxes and pay phones as these do), but it gets better and more compelling as it goes on. Set in a barrio war zone controlled by MS-13 kingpin Rincon (David Castaneda of the Netflix series THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY), who's already reaching "heavy is the crown" levels of paranoia, so much so that he really only trusts teenage drug delivery boy and collector Lucas (Elijah Rodriguez), who lost his older brother in Afghanistan and is doing everything he can to shield his younger brother Miguel (Nicholas Sean Johnny) from gang life. Rincon is preoccupied with the wedding of his baby sister Gabriella (Robyn Cara) and entrusts Lucas to deliver two bricks of heroin to a contact just outside his territory. But Lucas is distracted when he learns that Rincon's guys are planning to initiate Miguel into MS-13, so he never makes the drop and is instead pursued by Rincon's hot-headed cousin and ambitious second-in-command Jester (Charlie MacGechan). Fleeing for safety, they end up in the car of Daniel (Van Damme), an Oxycontin-addicted neighborhood mechanic and ex-Marine who lost his ability to speak when he took some shrapnel in a bomb blast in Afghanistan.

Set over the course of Gabriella's wedding day, WE DIE YOUNG turns into a standard-issue, urban "survive the night" scenario with Rincon's guys eventually catching Lucas and Miguel, forcing Daniel to channel the long-dormant warrior within to mount a daring one-man rescue. Making his narrative feature debut, Israeli-American documentary filmmaker Lior Geller has obviously spent time worshiping at the altar of Alfonso Cuaron, with a couple of reasonably well-executed handheld, long-take chase sequences, both in a car (complete with blood splattering against the lens, as required by law) and on foot. The problem is that you've seen them all before, along with the heavy-handed digital insertion of the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument into the background to remind you that This Is America, and all the hackneyed literary allusions with Daniel trying to get Lucas to read A Tale of Two Cities and Rincon serving as an ersatz Shakespearean figure who even quotes The Merchant of Venice at one point. To his credit, Castaneda tries to bring some complexity to a potentially cartoonish character, and Van Damme (one of 37 credited producers) does a fine job letting his aged face, pinched into an almost constant contorted grimace due to Daniel's chronic pain, speak volumes. But for the most part, there's nothing new here--the kid who's been sucked into the gang life trying to keep his little brother from the same fate, the SCARFACE trope of the powerful gangster being possessive of his little sister, the quiet loner silently suffering in a shell of his former self until he has a reason to take action. In the end, it's a decent enough Redbox rental, as Geller gussies it up with some occasionally effective documentary immediacy, and its three solid lead performances (Castaneda and Rodriguez were both in SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO as well) give it a little more credibility than those early Bulgarian backlot scenes would initially indicate. (R, 93 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: RUPTURE (2017); XX (2017); and BEYOND THE GATES (2016)

RUPTURE
(Italy/US - 2017)

RUPTURE is the first directing effort in a decade from Steven Shainberg, who had some significant critical acclaim with 2002's SECRETARY.  But after the mixed reception of his 2006 Diane Arbus biopic FUR, he concentrated on producing until ending his filmmaking sabbatical with this strange horror film that tries to straddle the line between arthouse and grindhouse and comes up short in both. Renee Morgan (Noomi Rapace) is a divorced Kansas City mom who drops off her son Evan (Percy Hynes White) for the weekend with his bitter, angry father. Heading to meet a guy she's been dating for a skydiving excursion, her plans are derailed when a device attached to her rear tire causes it to blow out and she's abducted on the side of a deserted road by several people in a hauling truck. Shackled and with black tape wrapped around her head with only her eyes, nostrils, and mouth exposed, she's taken several days away to a grimy, dimly-lit, generic horror movie warehouse at an undisclosed location and strapped to a table in an observation room. Various mysterious personnel--Dianne (Kerry Bishe), Dr. Nyman (Lesley Manville), and a well-dressed Bald Man (Michael Chiklis)--interrogate her with personal questions that seem to focus primarily on her fears. Exploiting her fear of spiders--which they already know because of hidden surveillance cameras throughout her home--their goal is to get her to break, to "rupture," to reach the point where she "destroys" her fear. These mystery people--are they part of a secret government operation?--are researching a genetic code known as "G10/12x," which they believe is the key to fear, and to lose that sense of being afraid causes an inner mutation that makes carriers of that gene the next phase of human evolution.

The script by Brian Nelson (HARD CANDY, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT) is filled with heady concepts, but once RUPTURE takes a hard turn towards sci-fi in its third act, its half-baked ideas don't hold up under much scrutiny. For the most part, it's a claustrophobic and unpleasant mix of MARTYRS, HOSTEL, and William Friedkin's BUG, but its disparate elements never really gel. RUPTURE might've made for a solid TWILIGHT ZONE episode, but by the end, there's more questions than answers (such as why, if these mystery people are capable of what they are, do they still have to rely on old-school security cameras to learn more about Renee prior to abducting her?). It's hardly the triumphant return of a briefly-lauded filmmaker, and it's hard telling what it was that made Shainberg decide RUPTURE was the project to lure him back behind the camera. RUPTURE stumbles with some embarrassingly bush-league CGI spiders and shape-shifting that appear to be on loan from a 1997 NuImage production, and other than Rapace, the cast--which also includes Peter Stormare, cast radically against type as "Peter Stormare," as the leader of this mysterious outfit--seems lost. Just as odd as Shainberg directing, it's hard telling what inspired Mike Leigh regular Manville (HIGH HOPES, TOPSY-TURVY, ANOTHER YEAR) to go slumming in something like this, unless it just seemed a lot smarter on the page. Similarly, someone forgot to tell Rapace that she's starring in a garbage B-movie, because she admirably gives this thing everything she's got. She's so committed--mentally and physically--to this character and her situation that she single-handedly makes RUPTURE worth seeing for fans of the original Lisbeth Salander. (Unrated, 101 mins)



XX
(US - 2017)

XX got a lot of buzz in horror circles for its unique standing as an anthology project created by and centered on women. In its initial stages, the filmmakers involved were set to be Jennifer Lynch (BOXING HELENA), Jen & Sylva Soska (AMERICAN MARY), Mary Harron (AMERICAN PSYCHO), Karyn Kusama (THE INVITATION), and former Rue Morgue editor Jovanka Vuckovic. By the time the XX was officially underway, Lynch, Harron, and the Soskas dropped out, with Kusama and Vuckovic joined by Roxanne Benjamin (SOUTHBOUND) and Annie Clark, better known as musician St. Vincent, with Mexican stop-motion animator Sofia Carrillo handling the wraparound and the "interstitial" segments between the stories. Oddly enough, it's the least-experienced filmmakers of the bunch who fare best, with Vuckovic's opener "The Box," based on a Jack Ketchum short story about a child's curiosity about the contents of a gift box held by a stranger on a train ultimately sending a family into emotional and physical turmoil as everyone who finds out what's in the box begins starving themselves. Clark's "The Birthday Party," which she co-wrote with Benjamin, is a deadpan farce with Melanie Lynskey as a wife and mom desperately trying to carry on with her seven-year-old daughter's birthday party even though her husband drops dead right before the guests arrive. It's a one-joke story that gets an admittedly huge laugh at the end, but perhaps not big enough to justify the elaborate buildup.

At that point, XX fails to heed its own advice with "Don't Fall," a useless ten-minute trifle from Benjamin with a group of obnoxious campers being pursued by a shape-shifting desert creature. The closer is "Her Only Living Son," and it's quite a disappointment from Kusama, who doesn't keep her INVITATION momentum going. Waitress and single mom Cora (Christina Kirk) is having a hard time dealing with her rebellious son Andy (Kyle Allen) on the eve of his 18th birthday. He's in trouble at school and he's prone to nasty mood swings, but his increasingly violent behavior is justified or outright ignored by those seemingly under his spell, including the overly friendly mailman (Mike Doyle) whose job it's been to "watch over him" all these years. It's bad enough that Kusama's script doesn't even follow its own internal logic, since much is made of Andy's resentment that they've had to move around every few years to avoid "Andy's father," which immediately calls into question how the mailman has watched over them "all these years." But what really makes "Her Only Living Son" collapse in on itself is that it's ultimately nothing more than fan fiction derived from a certain late 1960s supernatural horror classic that's obvious the moment "Andy's father" is mentioned. It's interesting that three of the four stories--and Carrillo's animation, to an extent--deal directly with the lengths a mother will go to protect her family, but Benjamin's story is not only the odd woman out, but it's also a complete waste of time. XX is a good idea, but two of the filmmakers fall asleep on the job:  Benjamin torpedoes any momentum this thing had going, and anyone who watches enough horror anthologies knows you have to finish big, but Kusama completely drops the ball and regardless of XX's intent, the result is an underwhelming disappointment. (R, 81 mins)



BEYOND THE GATES
(US - 2016)

Another in a long line of fetishistic '80s VHS horror throwbacks, BEYOND THE GATES has good intentions but stumbles by not knowing the difference between "slow burn" and "lollygagging," taking a promising premise and turning it into yet another fanboy-anointed "insta-horror classic" (© William Wilson) that's just not. Vincenzo Salvia's killer synth tune "Outrun with the Dead" gets things going in the right direction as two estranged brothers--elder, uptight Gordon (Graham Skipper) and younger, aimless slacker John (Chase Williamson of JOHN DIES AT THE END)--arrive in town to clean out and close up an old-school video store (played by the legendary L.A. memorabilia mecca Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee) owned by their father, who's been missing for seven months. The brothers clearly don't get along and there's hints of childhood trauma and their dad's heavy drinking, and Gordon's surly unease doesn't let up even with his loving and supportive girlfriend Margot (Brea Grant) in tow. Back in their dad's office, Gordon and John find a VCR/board game called "Beyond the Gates," which includes seizure-inducing strobe lighting as well as a sultry hostess (RE-ANIMATOR's Barbara Crampton) who seems to know of their father's whereabouts. She challenges the brothers and Margot to play the game and find four keys in various unlikely locations in order to save the soul of their dad, who's trapped in some kind of tortured purgatory within the game.

The concept of a haunted VCR board game sounds like something Charles Band would've commissioned at Empire in 1985 around the time of THE DUNGEONMASTER or TERRORVISION, and while that's ultimately the direction BEYOND THE GATES heads with the world inside the game being shrouded in thick fog and purple/pink neon lighting and some probably intentionally janky-looking practical splatter effects, director/co-writer Jackson Stewart takes entirely too long to get there. The script makes an effort to create strong characters, and Skipper and Williamson are believable as distant siblings forced to rebuild their long-lost bond, but BEYOND THE GATES loses its way.  There's a sense of lingering resentment toward recovering alcoholic Gordon, both from John and his bullying, asshole friend Hank (Justin Welborn), while Margot is saddled with unsubtle exposition drops about having a hard time sleeping after injuring her wrist in a vague "fall," a obvious red flag that the cycle of alcoholism and abuse has been passed on to Gordon and it's the very reason he split when he was 18 and never looked back. These are interesting ideas and characterizations that are left flailing as BEYOND THE GATES devotes entirely too much time to Gordon and John sitting around twiddling their thumbs while they decide to enter the game and rescue what's left of their dad. This could've been a smart film with a deeper subtext--like, say, THE BABADOOK or IT FOLLOWS--but it never finds the right balance between its character-driven, mumblecore components and its mandatory indulgence in heavy retro '80s worship. That opening synth jam is a keeper, though. (Unrated, 82 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

On DVD/Blu-ray: CLOWN (2016); BASKIN (2016); and THE INVITATION (2016)

CLOWN
(US - 2016)

When 2015's COP CAR got some festival buzz going and became a minor hit on the arthouse circuit, it was enough to bump director/co-writer Jon Watts and his writing partner Christopher Ford into megabudget circles with the upcoming reboot SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING. But long before COP CAR, Watts and Ford made their debut, the horror film CLOWN. Shot in late 2012 but kept on a shelf by the Weinstein Co. until 2016, CLOWN is a feature-length expansion of a fake trailer Watts and Ford made and posted to YouTube in 2010. The "trailer," about a demonic clown, jokingly proclaimed "From master of horror Eli Roth," which prompted a flattered Roth to meet with the pair and offer to produce an actual CLOWN movie. While Robert Rodriguez's MACHETE may have worked once--before the novelty wore off with MACHETE KILLS--CLOWN is more on the HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN end of fake trailers-turned-real movies. Leadenly-paced and feeling much longer than 99 minutes, CLOWN has dad Kent (Andy Powers) forced by a cancellation to don an old clown costume for his son Jack's (Christian Distefano) birthday party. The suit and makeup soon adhere to and fuse with his body, making it impossible to take off.  After several failed and increasingly gruesome attempts to get out of the costume, a desperate Kent shoots himself in the head only to find he can't die. This drives him to madness and murder, as his wife Meg (Laura Allen) learns from Karlsson (Peter Stormare), the suit's previous owner, that it's an instrument of a demon who subsists on the sacrificing of five children a year. This leads to a repetitive series of sequences with Kent pursuing children and slowly morphing into a full-on clown demon as Meg tries to keep him from killing Jack. There's some intriguing and occasionally ballsy ideas in CLOWN--Karlsson's brother was a pediatric cancer specialist, so the pair conquered the clown curse by offering the demon terminally ill children, and when the demon offers to give Kent back for one more child, Meg isn't above leading an innocent kid to the slaughter if it means saving her family--but CLOWN just doesn't come together. It's sluggish and dull, and it needs a better actor than Powers to really feel for Kent's plight. It doesn't skimp on the gore and some occasional shock value antics, but this story is, at best, a 20-minute segment in an anthology film. (R, 99 mins)

BASKIN
(Turkey/US/UK - 2016)

This Turkish import got some significant acclaim at film festivals and from the horror scenester echo chamber, which only serves as further evidence that fanboys will bestow accolades on pretty much everything. BASKIN is a tired, slow-moving splatterfest that's a veritable grab-bag of cribbed material. The crux of the plot is essentially a Turkish HELLRAISER, with a quintet of cops answering a call for backup and ending up at a long-abandoned police station off a dark country road on the middle of nowhere. There's some backstory about the father-son relationship between the in-charge Boss Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu) and young rookie Arda (Gorkem Kasal), who was more or less raised by Remzi after a traumatic childhood incident that, of course, comes into play late in the film. The dark, empty police outpost is filled with bloodied, contorted souls in a mad orgy of sex and torture, overseen by "The Father," played in a bit of FREAKS and THE SENTINEL-style stunt casting by non-actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu. The Father puts the cops through all the torture porn tropes, whether it's slowly tearing out one's intestinal tract or carving out another's eyes and tongue-kissing the socket before making him fuck a goat-masked woman from behind.

It was the eye socket moment where I finally lost my patience with BASKIN. Not because of the gore or the perverse French kissing of the eye socket--that wasn't the problem at all. Even from the start, little things started rubbing me the wrong way and I was getting grouchy without really realizing it, whether it was a restaurant scene where the cops are swapping stories and one goes into a Joe Pesci "Funny how?" routine from GOODFELLAS; or the long exploration of the dark, cavernous underbelly of the abandoned police station that just seemed a little too much like SESSION 9; or the fleeting glimpse of an obviously non-human figure darting across the frame like he was trying to find his way back to THE DESCENT. Director/co-writer Can Evrenol, expanding his 2013 short film of the same name, was wearing his love of horror movies on his sleeve, but it was just getting to be too much. Too forced. By the time The Father turns up about an hour in, talking about being "one with the cosmos" and "you always carry Hell with you," he started to sound a lot like HELLRAISER's Pinhead in the days when he was simply known as "Lead Cenobite." But then the eye socket scene happened and Evrenol lost me. He accompanies it with a prominent cue from Riz Ortolani's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST score--including that synthy beeeeeew!--and the transparency was just too much to ignore. That's what I concluded to be the exact moment where those lauding the film tilted their heads back, closed their eyes, exhaled slowly and purred "Oh, right there. That's the spot. I'm yours, BASKIN." There's nothing here but Evrenol name-checking bits and pieces of his favorite horror movies, bringing nothing new to the table but fooling enough people into proclaiming BASKIN some triumphant new vision of horror. It's lazy, it's uninspired, and worst of all, it's not scary. At all. It's all smoke and mirrors, and once again, horror fans prove themselves to be the biggest genre pushovers in moviegoing. BASKIN is the most overrated horror film since GOODNIGHT MOMMY. One more time, gang: start being a little more discerning, and a little less concerned with making sure your free screeners and your convention credentials keep coming. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix)


THE INVITATION
(US - 2016)

While everyone was busy fellating BASKIN, another horror film was stealthily released around the same time that actually deserved the accolades but more or less fell off the radar even with the scenesters. A slow-burner that starts ratcheting the tension in the first scene and never lets up, THE INVITATION is a film where it's best to go in knowing as little as possible. It's also one of the best films of the year that you've probably heard nothing about. En route to a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) accidentally hit a coyote that Will is forced to put out of its misery via tire iron. That will turn out to be the least upsetting thing about the evening. The dinner party is at Will's old house, hosted by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband, record producer/recovering addict David (Michiel Huisman). Several of their closest friends are there and it's been two years since they've all been together, the group more or less splintering when Will and Eden's young son died and their marriage didn't survive the aftermath. Right off the bat, Will gets a strange vibe from Eden and David, the two endlessly talking about a trip to Mexico where they embraced a self-help philosophy of grief coping known as "The Invitation." Also at the party is a friend they met in Mexico, a clingy and needy young woman named Sadie (Lindsay Burdge), who almost instantly offers to sleep with Will. There's also the ominous presence of stranger named Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), a friend of Eden's and David's who breaks the ice by showing the group a DVD of an assisted suicide they observed in Mexico. Wounds that never completely healed are torn open as Will vehemently disagrees with the way Eden has addressed her grief. He's also bothered by Pruitt and the fact that the windows have bars on them, that David has locked all the doors from the inside, and the fact that one of the guests they're still waiting on left David a voice mail two hours earlier saying he was the first one there, yet no one has seen him and he's nowhere to be found.

Things only get more claustrophobic and uncomfortable from there, with things boiling over into sheer terror by the end. So many films do the slow-burn approach that ends being a lot of buildup to nothing, but THE INVITATION hooks you in from the start. No matter how slow or meandering it may seem in the early going, every line, every incredulous glance, and every reaction from Will is important. Screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi must've been sitting on this one for a while and saving it for the right occasion, because nothing else they've written--AEON FLUX, the CLASH OF THE TITANS remake, R.I.P.D., and both RIDE ALONGs--would indicate a capacity for the complexity and near anxiety-attack levels of suspense that transpire here. Nothing it as it seems and you'll never see where the story is heading with THE INVITATION. It's directed by Karyn Kusama, who established her indie cred with 2000's GIRLFIGHT but then washed out with high-profile studio projects AEON FLUX (2005) and JENNIFER'S BODY (2009). She's mainly been keeping busy directing TV (THE L WORD, CHICAGO FIRE, HALT AND CATCH FIRE), and THE INVITATION is her first feature film in seven years. It's a small masterpiece as far as modern day horror goes, a film that got some glowing reviews but very little attention from horror fans seemingly ready to call anything that gets made a classic. That's not to say THE INVITATION is an Insta-Horror Classic (© William Wilson), but it's one of the very few films of recent years, along with THE BABADOOK, IT FOLLOWS, THE WITCH, and HUSH, that deserves the kind of fawning hype that comes with today's horror offerings. (Unrated, 100 mins, also streaming on Netflix)